In 1979, a year after Antonio Guzmán came to power, two severe weather events in nine days destroyed hundreds of thousands of homes, killed more than 2,400 people, and exposed the fragility of four decades of Dominican housing policy. What the government promised to resolve in six months remains unresolved for some families almost half a century later
SANTO DOMINGO. – When the Dominican Revolutionary Party came to power in August 1978, Antonio Guzmán Fernández received a city and a country with a chronic housing deficit, according to data from the National Planning Office (ONAPLAN) cited by Dr. Natalia Ulloa Cáceres in her doctoral thesis, "Social Housing in Santo Domingo."
From 1959 to 1981, more than 20% of the country's population had moved between provinces, and this migratory flow, which was most intense in the sixties and seventies, had depopulated rural areas and steadily increased the demand for housing in the capital, generating a pressure that the pace of construction during Balaguer's twelve years had never managed to solve.
The change of government also brought a change in the economic model: the policy of massive public investment in construction was abandoned and spending was redirected towards agricultural activity.
From 1978 to 1986, as documented by Ulloa Cáceres, the city's growth occurred primarily through private initiative, both formal and informal. The State relinquished its leadership in construction just when an external event would force it to urgently resume it.
The first blow: hurricane and storm
On August 31, 1979, just a year after Guzmán assumed the presidency, Hurricane David, a category five on the Saffir-Simpson scale, made landfall between the provinces of San Cristóbal and Peravia with sustained winds of 240 kilometers per hour, the most intense recorded on Dominican soil until then.
The eye of the cyclone entered through Punta Palenque, about 15 kilometers east of Punta Salinas, around 4:30 in the afternoon, and crossed the territory for approximately four hours before exiting through Montecristi and Pepillo Salcedo into the Atlantic waters.
The toll was devastating. According to Ulloa Cáceres's thesis, the phenomenon caused the death of some 2,400 people, although other sources from the time put that figure as high as 4,000. Damage to housing, infrastructure, and communications was concentrated mainly in the provinces of Azua, Peravia, San Cristóbal, the National District, and part of La Vega, according to a report by the Economic Commission for Latin America and the Caribbean (ECLAC).
In the provinces of Montecristi, Valverde, Santiago Rodríguez, Santiago, and La Vega, the damage was particularly severe for crops and plantations. In some areas of La Vega, rainfall exceeded 400 millimeters in just a few hours.
In communities in Peravia, the impact was devastating: in Sainaguá, Palenque, Sabana de Palenque, Nizao, and Don Gregorio, more than 90% of the homes were destroyed. Flooding from the Nizao and Yubazo rivers swept away entire communities and caused the deaths of hundreds of people, including entire families.
Nationwide, estimates at the time calculated that more than 600,000 people lost their homes in San Cristóbal, Baní, Azua, the National District, San Pedro de Macorís, Higüey, La Romana, El Seibo, and Monte Plata. Seventy percent of the electrical system collapsed, and the complete restoration of services took months. The industrial parks of Haina and Herrera were devastated. Losses in the agricultural sector exceeded one billion dollars.
One of the factors that exacerbated the human toll was the lack of preparedness among the population. The Dominican Republic had not experienced a hurricane of that magnitude since the San Zenón cyclone of 1930, almost fifty years earlier. Radio warnings were minimal, disaster preparedness programs were practically nonexistent, and many citizens did not take the danger seriously until it was too late.
The second blow: Storm Federico
Four days after David, when rescue efforts were just beginning and the country was processing the magnitude of the catastrophe, Tropical Storm Federico hit the territory following a similar trajectory to that of the hurricane, with the aggravating factor that it stalled over the territory.
Its six consecutive days of rain flooded and swept away much of the agricultural land that David had left damaged, destroyed what remained of the productive infrastructure in the central and southern parts of the country, and caused the death of thousands of cattle and poultry.
The reconstruction of communications, electrical networks, housing, roads and highways took between two and three years.
The double impact had a consequence that goes beyond material figures. From that moment on, writes Ulloa Cáceres, the need to use materials and construction techniques more resistant to the threats to which a coastal city with a tropical climate is exposed became evident.
David and Federico not only destroyed homes: they changed the way housing construction was approached in the country.
The government's response
President Guzmán declared a state of emergency in the Dominican Republic and imposed a curfew from 6:00 p.m. to 6:00 a.m. to prevent theft and looting. Authorities focused their initial efforts on reopening Las Américas International Airport and distributing food to emergency centers, as agricultural products had quickly run out due to the double hurricane. International aid was crucial during this immediate phase.
In the aftermath of the disaster, President Guzmán ordered a plan to rebuild homes using concrete blocks to replace the wooden structures. The program also reflected a hard-won lesson: homes built with permanent materials had withstood the storm better than the wood and zinc structures that predominated in rural areas and working-class neighborhoods of the affected provinces.
The shelters that became permanent
But the government's response had a structural limitation whose consequences would be evident for decades. Thousands of families displaced by the hurricane were placed in temporary shelters with the promise that they would be relocated to permanent housing within months. That promise, in many cases, was not kept.
Ciudad Alternativa, a Dominican housing rights organization, documented the persistence of this debt in subsequent years. A report published on October 16, 2017, by journalist Carmen Jiménez for the EFE news agency, and reproduced on the organization's website, details the case of the Canta La Rana shelter in the municipality of Los Alcarrizos.
Beatriz Báez arrived there with her father in 1979, when she was a child, seeking refuge from the effects of Hurricane David. Thirty-eight years later, she was still living in the same shack with wooden walls and a zinc roof, now with several of her children and grandchildren. They were told they would be there for six months. "Look where those six months have led me: I got married here, had seven children, and now I have fourteen grandchildren," she told the journalist.
At that time, 70 families lived in Canta La Rana, most of them having spent their entire lives in that shelter intended as a temporary solution.
Ciudad Alternativa also documents the existence throughout the country of people who continue to live in extremely precarious conditions in shelters set up as an emergency solution after David in 1979, in addition to those from Hurricane Georges in 1998, and after storms Olga and Noel in 2007.
The organization describes a recurring structural pattern in every disaster: shelters and barracks originally intended to be temporary become, over the years, permanent, low-quality, and under-resourced housing, lacking basic services and with poor living conditions, while the government fails to follow up or fulfill its promise to resettle the population. In some cases, families have been waiting for five, fifteen, or even thirty years.
The director of Oxfam in the Dominican Republic, Raúl del Río, stated in that same 2017 report that, despite the country's vulnerability to hurricanes, the government had not provided an adequate response to the problem of precarious housing, which affects 71% of the population. At that time, some 8,000 people across the country had been living in deplorable conditions in shelters for years.
Beatriz Báez's story is the most accurate X-ray of what David and Federico revealed about Dominican housing policy: not only the fragility of homes in the face of wind, but also the fragility of the State in the face of the debt imposed by natural disasters.
Sources: Natalia Ulloa Cáceres, Social Housing in Santo Domingo: Opportunities for Recycling Existing Housing Stock, doctoral thesis, Department of Architectural Projects, September 2017. Economic Commission for Latin America and the Caribbean (ECLAC), report on damages from Hurricane David, 1979. Carmen Jiménez (EFE) / Ciudad Alternativa, “Life Under a Zinc Roof: The Other Side of the Dominican Republic’s Paradise,” October 16, 2017, ciudadalternativa.org.do. Ciudad Alternativa, “Victims and Refugees Due to Neglect,” ciudadalternativa.org.do.
Series: History of social housing in the Dominican Republic. (Chapter XI).
Recommended readings:
